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Today, 16 December, is the 120th anniversary of a murder that shocked the theatre-going world of Victorian Britain, and the general public. It was on this day that the eminent and popular actor William Terriss was killed, just outside the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre on London’s Strand.

Terriss was murdered by a less successful actor, Richard Archer Prince, who had fixated on the idea that Terriss was responsible for his lack of success.

The 50-year-old actor had been about to enter the theatre on the evening of 16 December, using the stage door at the rear of the theatre, which opens out onto Maiden Lane, parallel to the Strand. He was due on stage that night, appearing in the play Secret Service. Before he could get into the theatre, however, he was accosted by the younger Richard Prince, who had been waiting for him, and was stabbed to death.

Prince was not unknown to his victim. The two men had previously been in a production together – Prince in a minor role – and Terriss had, on one occasion, been so offended by something the struggling actor had said to him that he was said to have had him dismissed. This was said to have caused lasting resentment to Prince; although Terriss had subsequently tried to find him work, and had ensured he was sent small sums of money via the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, Prince had been unable to find any security in his chosen profession.

The case, understandably, caused pages and pages of sensationalised press coverage; the theatrical newspaper The Era described the murder in the following terms:

“A great blow has fallen upon the dramatic profession and the playgoing public – a blow so sudden and so terrible that even after the lapse of two nights and a day they have scarcely recovered from the stunning, overpowering, effect of the awful news.” (The Era, 18 December 1897)

The murder was newsworthy for several reasons. It was an incredibly rare offence – no English actor had been murdered in the country by one of his profession before, certainly not during the Victorian era.

The offence had taken place in the heart of London’s theatre land. It had been witnessed by others; and the victim was both well-known and well-loved (The Era noted that Terriss was liked by all classes, from those in the ‘mansions of the West End’ to the residents of the ‘slums of the East’). It was also, though, the culmination of the increasingly obsessive behaviour evinced by individuals towards successful actors and actresses.

There had been spates of what we today call stalking throughout the Victorian era, with both men and women being targeted by ‘fans’, who would send love letters, demand to see the actors after their performances, or follow them. The press had reported instances of actresses being followed home from performances and assaulted, and of one actress being sent a bullet by an obsessed man who decided he would kill her if she wouldn’t have a relationship with him.

Part of The Era’s coverage of Terriss’s murder

In these instances, though, the stalkers involved did not kill their obsessions, although they may have threatened to, or have injured them. Part of the huge reaction to Terriss’s murder, then, was due to its rarity: perhaps it foretold of a more dangerous age to come, when stalking, and deaths as the result of them, would cease to be so unusual.

The murder was also significant because of the focus on Prince’s mental health. He clearly had issues, as evinced in his desire to blame Terriss for his employment and financial difficulties – and he had previously turned up at the Adelphi to argue his case with Terriss.

He was found guilty but insane at his subsequent trial, but his punishment caused debate about the status of actors in British society, and whether the murder of an actor was perceived as a lesser offence than anyone else’s murder. This was because of the insanity judgement; rather than being sent to prison, or even hanged, Prince was ordered to be sent to Broadmoor, where he lived a long life (and a more comfortable than in a Victorian prison), dying there in 1936.

For more on the death of William Terriss, and the incidences of stalking involving actors and actresses in Victorian Britain, read my book, Life On The Victorian Stage (Pen & Sword, 2017).

This 1891 article refers back to the moral panic caused by the Ratcliff Highway murders 80 years earlier

A couple of people on my Twitter timeline posted this earlier today – it’s an article on The Daily Beast about an app, Citizen, that is designed to highlight the crimes currently underway in your neighbourhood, and to enable individuals to discuss it (you can also receive alerts ‘every time a significant incident or emergency happens near you’, according to the app’s promo statement).

It sounds, at first glance, to be an app serving the public interest. You can avoid places where trouble is underway; if you’re brave (or foolhardy), you can intervene; or you can talk about it with others in your vicinity, perhaps reassuring each other about it.

But, as writer Taylor Lorenz states in the Daily Beast article,

“Do I need to know about every carjacking in sight of my office to remain personally safe? Probably not. Using Citizen, in fact, made me more paranoid and probably stoked a lot of my latent irrational fears about violent crime and axe murderers.”

In this, Taylor is no different to newspaper readers in the 18th and 19th centuries, who were both terrified of crime, yet drawn to stories of crime at the same time. Newspapers fed into their fears by increasingly publishing crime stories, drawn from court cases, gossip, and imagination. Reading the Victorian newspapers on the British Newspaper Archive, it’s hard to miss the reams of murders, assaults, thefts, and more bizarre or unusual crimes with their dramatic headlines and breathless tones.

The Whitechapel Murders created huge panic, not just in 1888, but for years afterwards (and perhaps even today). This example is from the Illustrated Police News in 1905.

These stories often used what appears to modern eyes to be a standard narrative – in many cases, the perpetrator of the crime is male, working-class, from a poor or slum area. He may be a drunkard; he may be Irish (many crimes were associated with Irish immigrants, with drink, or with class, betraying Victorian xenophobia and class-consciousness, as well as later efforts by temperance advocates to associate drink with criminality).

Moral panics were created or fed by these newspapers; an isolated case, or a couple of unrelated offences, might be seized upon and magnified, a link being made between disparate offences in order to create the impression of a crime wave. A particular group within society might then be associated with this offence, or group of offences, with the press and/or legislators then seeking to make an example of this group.

This ‘deviancy amplification spiral’, as criminologists and sociologists have termed it (1), could either make it appear more serious an offence than it was; or have the unintended result of readers, the public, then romanticising the criminal and his actions, making a folk-hero of him if he wasn’t feared instead. There were, then, two possible over-reactions – fear, or the adoption of a romantic narrative that may not have reflected the crime or the criminal (see the romanticisation of highwaymen in some quarters).

Elements of the press had some consciousness of what was happening here; in 1874, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph noted that:

‘happiness and goodness, because they are common-place conditions of life, do not make anything like the same impression on men’s minds that is made by the exceptional instances of vice and misery. We hear of a horrid murder… of some pitiable scene of domestic discord or moarital violence, and compare men with brutes…and are tempted to despair of human nature.’ (2)

The paper argued that such crime stories attracted public attention (and that of the press) because of their relative rarity – that is why they were newsworthy. Its comment also suggested that an aspect of human nature was – and is – inclined to use such relatively isolated cases to think about wider philosophical issues about life and death. Yet it failed to acknowledge its own role in magnifying these ‘rare’ offences and to create a panic amongst the public that crime was more prevalent than it really was.

Moral panics, of course, have never gone away, as the prevalence of books discussing contemporary examples show (3). The Citizen app suggests that there are simply more ways today to disseminate crime news and to create a moral panic; it originally started as an app that was deemed to encourage vigilante action, and so hastily rebranded and relaunched – but now, it appears that it serves a more voyeuristic than useful purpose, thus highlighting its similarity to crime reporting throughout the last few centuries.

See, for example, Julian Pettley (ed), Moral Panics in the Contemporary World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Erich Goode, Moral Panics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 2nd ed); Chas Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (OUP, 2003). All discuss modern examples of moral panics. In terms of work on earlier moral panics, David Lemming and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (2009) is highly recommended.

The two newspaper excerpts used as illustrations in this post come from the Homeward Mail of 16 March 1891, and the Illustrated Police News of 23 December 1905, both via the British Newspaper Archive.

I am used more to writing about Victorian crime than more modern offences, and as part of my writing, I’ve often read the work of others on infanticide, and the impact of illegitimacy on women – aside from the possibility of being regarded as ‘immoral’ for having had sex outside of marriage (unlike men), women had to worry about how they would cope economically: would they be able to provide for a child? Would they be able to find and keep a job, if their employers knew they were an unmarried mother? What help was there for them if they struggled?

In Victorian times, infanticide might be the answer, the last resort, although sympathy towards such women can be sometimes detected in the decision to find them guilty of the lesser charge of concealing the birth of a child, rather than in the capital offence of infanticide; or in the increasingly common decision not to carry out the death penalty but to imprison these women instead.

Even well into the 20th century, it was not unheard of for the mother of an illegitimate child to try and kill her offspring; however, there was a more obvious sympathy towards the woman expressed by the courts, and greater time and effort made to understand why she had committed such a crime. In 1939, one case was heard in Rosyth, Fife, that was duly reported in The Scotsman.

Although the individuals involved in the case were named in press reports at the time, I’m choosing not to here, as there is a possibility that the children involved are still alive today (although the original sources are listed at the end of this post).

The case centred around a young woman who was accused of having thrown or dropped her two-year-old daughter from a train in the Inverkeithing tunnel the previous autumn, with the aim of killing her. By some miracle, the child not only survived, but was said to have survived unharmed. The advocate in the case described it as ‘very exceptional, very difficult and very sad’.

The woman was actually married, but her husband was in the navy, and so she rarely got to see him as he was posted abroad. She had had a son by the husband while he was home; but she found it increasingly difficult to cope with a young child on her own.

She was a nervous woman who worried a lot, even about small things. She needed a bit of love and attention – and in 1936, she found it with another man, although apparently only for a brief spell. This caused her more worry, however, when she found out she was pregnant – not by her absent husband, but by this brief fling. In early 1937, she gave birth to her daughter.

The husband duly found out, but stayed with his wife; however, she felt that he had never completely forgiven her for her ‘fall’, and she could therefore not forgive herself, either. In November 1938, while her husband was again away, her son became ill; she was nursing him, looking after her daughter, getting very little sleep, and she was short of money.

She wrote to her husband asking for money, and he immediately sent her a pound. As she hadn’t acknowledged receipt of it, a week later, he wrote asking whether she had received the money – she gained the impression that he was cross with her for asking for financial help.

Already struggling, she became increasingly upset, the lack of sleep causing her to lose whatever equilibrium she had had. Yet she was seen by her neighbours and family as a good mother, always ensuring that her children were fell fed and clothed.

On the evening of the train incident, she had made both her children their tea, before taking her daughter out. They got on the local train; but then she made the sudden decision to throw her child out.

There was no attempt to portray the mother as insane; however, it was recognised that on the night of the train journey, she was struggling so much from a lack of sleep and emotional problems, that she hadn’t been fully responsible for her actions.

A doctor was called as witness, who described the mitigating factors: the birth of her daughter, the ‘feeling of shame’ about her affair and its result (as in Victorian times, the birth of an illegitimate child was often viewed by authority as ‘shameful’, and mothers were almost expected to feel shamed by their actions), and her worries about her husband’s views.

The mother had thought that the little girl was coming between her and her husband; that he thought less of her as a result of her human fallibility; she was short of money and living in straitened circumstances in ‘unpleasant conditions’; she was worried about her son’s illness, and about the ‘unkindness’ she thought she saw in her husband’s latest letter.

Her action was a spontaneous one, an impulse reaction to the thoughts going round her head. As soon as she had thrown the child, she seemed to regain awareness, desperately trying to ‘recover’ her daughter.

Although she pleaded guilty at the start of her trial, her fate was determined by a group of men, of a different status to her, with little personal knowledge of the circumstances under which she laboured.

Different medical men differed in their opinions of her sanity; even the Lord Justice-Clerk and the advocate-depute, James Walker, disagreed over whether she was insane or sane, and whether she needed to be freed or made to undergo some kind of supervision – whether in an asylum or at home.

The advocate stated that ‘the case was left in a most unsatisfactory condition’. In the end, she was sentenced to three months in prison; however, after sentencing, the Lord Justice-Clerk added that ‘if the prison authorities thought that the woman’s case was one more suitable for hospital treatment than for ordinary prison treatment, they would have an entirely free hand to do what they thought right.’

And as for the little girl who was thrown out of the train, the court was told that she would be either adopted or looked after by her grandparents – she would not be returned to her mother.

So this was both a sympathetically heard case, but one that had no winners. The mother had pleaded guilty to assault with intent to murder, which should have led to a severe sentence – but she had only received three months, out of recognition for her ‘great mental distress’ at the time.

However, that sympathy did not extend to giving her the benefit of the doubt regarding the care of her daughter: she was to be removed from her parent, for good.

Sources:

The Scotsman, 18 January 1939, p.8; The Scotsman, 19 January 1939, p.14; Aberdeen Press & Journal, 19 January 1939, p.7. Images, unless otherwise stated, are from the Illustrated Police News (via British Newspaper Archive) and used for general illustrative purposes.

A depiction of the discovery of Mrs McLennan’s body, from the Illustrated Police News (found in the British Newspaper Archive)

It was December 1914; the smell of war was well and truly in the air, as Britain had commenced its involvement in what would be a four year war that would initially be known as the Great War before, decades later, becoming World War 1.

But in the community of Cockenzie, on the east coast of Scotland, the war must have felt a world away. However, their own peace was to be shattered by the discovery of the body of a young, blonde woman one Thursday morning, found on nearby Seton Sands. Her throat had been cut, and she had been dead for several hours.

Initially, her identity was not known – the police had simply described her as in her early 20s, good-looking, and, rather strangely, ‘possibly a shop assistant’. She was found clothed, and in the pocket of her skirt was a ha’penny, and a small bag of peppermint sweets marked with the name of a confectioner in Edinburgh.

The East Lothian police sent three bloodhounds on the scent of the murderer for the following 48 hours, but nothing was found except for a blood-stained razor – presumably the murder weapon. Even the sweet bag turned out to be almost useless as a clue, as it was one of thousands in existence with the name of a major wholesale sweet manufacturer on it – a manufacturer that, it was said, supplied almost every shop on the Scottish east coast.

However, although the murderer could not be found, the woman herself was soon identified. She was Mrs McLennan, aged 23, and she had been married just two years. Her marriage was already over in all but name, however, and she and her husband had separated, each returning to their own parents’ house to live. Mrs McLennan had returned home with a child, born in May 1913.

Mrs McLennan now lived with her parents in Bangor Road, Leith, and had left there on the Wednesday evening – she had not been seen again, although her death was estimated to have not occurred until four o’clock the next morning.

Her mother said that her daughter had spent the early part of the evening looking frequently at the clock, as though she had an appointment, and at six o’clock had put her hat on and opened the door. Her mother asked her why she was ‘going out on a cold night like that’, but she didn’t give a reason.

She had already had a brush with a violent man, though; she had, in fact, met her husband a couple of years earlier when, as she was crossing the Leith park, she had been ‘insulted’ by a man. She had called for help, and it was William McLennan who ran to her rescue. The insulting man had then assaulted McLennan, as he tried to protect the young woman – then known as Miss Howie.

The result of the assault was that William asked her out, and they were soon married.

The Nottingham Journal’s headline got the story slightly wrong – or at least, had the potential to be misconstrued…

It was not until February 1915 that anyone appeared in court in relation to Mrs McLennan’s death – and it was her valiant rescuer of a few years previously: William McLennan appeared in the Edinburgh High Court, charged with the murder of his wife.

William, described as a ‘man of weak appearance’, pleaded guilty to culpable homicide, and the Crown accepted this plea. It was stated that William had been ‘mentally deficient’ since his childhood, and his faculties had been further impaired by an accident shortly after marrying, and due to his ‘unhappy home circumstances’ with his wife. He was also severely epileptic, and had spent periods incarcerated in a lunatic asylum due to this, which had not helped his mental state.

He had arranged to go for a walk with his estranged wife on that Wednesday evening in December 1914, and at some point the following morning, he took a razor to her throat and killed her in what the court heard was a motiveless attack.

Although society had failed to treat him humanely for his epilepsy, his alleged mental deficiencies were treated more sympathetically. He received a relatively lenient sentence of seven years’ penal servitude for killing the girl he had rescued from another attacker in Leith park. Her rescuer had become her murderer.

NOTE: Sadly, although perhaps not unexpectedly, the press coverage of this murder failed to name the murder victim, apart from referring to her as Mrs McLennan – it was her marital status that was seen as important, not her own identity. However, a search on ScotlandsPeople would suggest that her name prior to marriage was Jemima Dawson Howie – a girl of this name married William McLennan in the Leith South district in 1912 (ref 692/2 312), which would match the information that WAS provided in the newspapers. The birth of Jemima Dawson Howie was registered in 1892 in Leith South (ref 692/2 213), which would again make her around the right age to have been the murder victim in this case.

Highly recommended this month is the free exhibition Rogues Gallery: Faces of Crime, 1870-1917, which is at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh until 1 December.

The centre of the small, but perfectly formed, exhibition is five photograph albums that survived from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, detailing some of the many Scottish criminals who were photographed after committing offences. Alongside these are historical trial records from the NRS.

Individuals whose stories are covered in the exhibition include Eugene Chantrelle, the French-born teacher who poisoned his wife Elizabeth in Edinburgh in 1878, and who is said to have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Mr Hyde, as well as lesser-known characters such as Margaret Reid, a servant convicted of theft and fraud in 1899, and thief George Anderson, who worked as a miner and watchmaker but who was convicted in 1901, at the age of 36.

More details can be found here; visit the exhibition Monday to Friday, 9.30am until 4.30pm, at the NRS, General Register House, 2 Princes Street, Edinburgh. There is also a great-sounding series of talks arranged to tie-in with the exhibition, and details of these can be found online here.

It was Hallowe’en – 31 October – in 1899, and a group of men and boys were celebrating the night in Yell – one of the Shetland islands in the north of Scotland. They were full of the joys of autumn – and possibly alcohol – but one man was not enjoying the pumpkin season, and had no desire to join in the fun.

This was Gilbert Tulloch, who lived at New House near the Yell Sound. He had no wish to be annoyed by the lively individuals outside, and so remained obstinately in his house, bolting his door against intruders. However, he had forgotten to bring his dog in, and the poor animal, stuck outside, started to bark.

Something then struck the door, and Gilbert, reluctantly, opened the door to quickly let the dog back in. However, he immediately saw a group of youths around 60 feet away, with one, Arthur Robertson, near the door. Gilbert spoke to him, presumably to ask him to keep further away from his house, or to request that he not strike his door. Robertson took offence and threw the nearest thing to hand at Mr Tulloch. That thing turned out to be a turnip.

The turnip struck Gilbert full in the face, and it was so heavy that it broke his nose, loosened five of his teeth, and struck him deaf in his right ear. Blood coursed down his face, making him appear as though he was a Hallowe’en creature rather than a persecuted householder.

Arthur Robertson was prosecuted, and duly convicted of a rather unusual-sounding offence: that of recklessly throwing a turnip. Because Gilbert had been so badly injured by it, the local sheriff decided that although Robertson had no prior convictions, he could not be convicted of this offence under the First Offenders Act. The sheriff further said that although he had ‘no objection to boys having larks’, in this case, it had led to both annoyance and injury to another man.

Robertson was fined 10 shillings – if he couldn’t, or refused to, pay, he would have to go to prison for four days instead. The sheriff noted that he hoped this punishment ‘would be taken as a warning by the youths of the county, and prevent them carrying their larks beyond the degree of moderation.’

This month, a new display appeared at the Museum of London Docklands looking at the history of the Thames River Police. Judging by the description of it on the museum’s website, it sounded like a major new exhibit – and this would be appropriate, given the long history of the Thames River Police, or Marine Police, which was founded in Wapping in 1798.

However, if you’re expecting a lot, like I was, you might be disappointed. After immediately visiting usual ground floor exhibition space only to find it dark and empty, I was redirected by a member of staff to the second floor – but I had already visited this, and hadn’t spotted anything about the police. On looking round the floor again, twice, I found the display, and understood why I missed it. There is nothing directing you to it; and it comprises a single display board (albeit a fairly large one) and one artefacts display case at the side of it.

The artefacts include a copy of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829; a copy of Patrick Colquhoun’s treatise, which inspired the creation of the police (he first published it in 1796, although the copy here is from the 6th edition); a police seal, hangar, scabbard, tipstaff, rattle and handcuffs, all dating from the first quarter of the 19th century,

Sources for these artefacts are the Thames Police Museum, the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre and the West India Committee (the latter having curated the display); but placed separately like this, they actually lose something – I felt I understood more about the Marine Police from my visit to the Thames Police Museum, where the curator talked me through the history and artefacts, in the police’s actual base.

A map of the Port of London, focal point of the display

The display board is nicely designed, with its focal point being a map of the Port of London, from the city, out east to the mouth of the Thames. But understandably, given its size, it has to limit the amount of information it tells you: so there’s a brief mention of the 1798 Dung Wharf riot, and the inevitable paragraph on the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811.

There’s better mention of Patrick Colquhoun than of John Harriott, the JP who devised a plan to police Thames shipping in 1797. It was Harriott’s plan that led Colquhoun to convince the West India merchants’ and planters’ committees to finance a year’s trial of this new police force, initially known as the West India Merchants Company Marine Police Institute – a trial which became a two year one, before, in 1800, government made the Marine Police a public police force under the control of the Home Secretary (see here for more on its early history).

I understand that this display is part of a larger project by the West India Committee to uncover the ‘little known shared heritage of the Caribbean and police services today’, and utilises its own archival resources. Yet given the Thames Police Museum’s own collection and expertise, it just feels like a wasted opportunity to publicise the history of the River Police to a wider audience, and to go into more detail about why it was set up, and the relationship between the police and the men they dealt with.

Patrick Colquhoun, founder of the Thames Marine Police

The West India Committee, meanwhile, claims on its website simply that it ‘founded… the Thames Police’ and that ‘West Indians ran, staffed and funded the force’, with its phrasing suggesting that West Indians were doing so prior to 1839. These claims (and potential differentiation between initiating an organisation, founding it, and funding it) deserved more detail than the limited information provided on the display board (I would have particularly have liked more detail on the Committee’s involvement with Colquhoun) – and the artefacts displayed fail to make any link to the West India Committee outside of them being simply police artefacts.

The Museum acknowledges that most people assume that the Metropolitan Police was the start of ‘modern’ policing in London, when actually, the Thames River Police is the longest, continuously serving police force not only in London, but in the world. I’m not sure the display is clear enough about its remit, and because of this, it frustrates by the bite-size pieces of information it offers visitors.

In October 1868, Sarah Edwards* appeared at the Oswestry sessions, together with an acquaintance named Richard Jones. They were charged with stealing a bottle of brandy.

They appear to have been regular offenders; Sarah had been acquitted of another theft six months earlier, and there are several entries in the Oswestry session records for Richard Jones, who seems to have been in and out of prison for larceny. **

Both pleaded guilty, Richard to theft and Sarah to receiving; Richard’s plea got him a sentence of seven years’ penal servitude, and Sarah received six months in prison.

She was unimpressed, however, and on the Recorder announcing her sentence, she grabbed a piece of coal that had been concealed in her clothing, and threw it at the Recorder. He was said to have ‘narrowly escaped a severe blow’.

Sarah was taken straight back to the dock after the furore had died down, and the rather cross Recorder immediately announced that she would now serve nine months in prison.

Luckily, Sarah had no more coal to throw, or she might have ended up with a longer sentence than her co-offender.

The record of the conviction, from Ancestry

*Newspaper reports refer to her as Sarah Williams, but Ancestry’s collection of crime registers names her as Sarah Edwards. It wasn’t unusual for 19th century newspapers to get often fundamental details wrong.

** It’s possible that there was more than one person named Richard Jones in this area, of course, as Oswestry is close to the Welsh border.

The conference is held every autumn, and this year, it will run from 10.30am until 4pm. The keynote speaker will be Dame Carmen Callil, speaking about transportation from Harborough to Australia, focusing on the case study of her ancestors, the Conquest boys. Cynthia Brown will then speak about passive resistance – including the prosecution of street sellers in Leicester in 1932.

Local writer David Bell will talk about murders in the county, with mention of its last triple hanging (of three Coalville miners), before MHHS member Alan Langley discusses local militias and their role in stopping the 1766 Cheese Riot!

In addition to the speakers, there will be stalls manned by local societies and organisations. Tickets for this Crime and Punishment day cost £15, but include a buffet lunch. To find out more, contact Mike Stroud at mikestroud01 [at] aol.com, or click here for a ticket application form.

I’ve been spending a bit of time delving into the Digital Panopticon’s many cases recently, and trying to find out information about them outside of their criminal records, to see how much of a life can be reassembled from this distance in time.

These men and women were more than their criminal career – what did they do outside of this, who were their families, who were their friends?

Unfortunately, of course, you can find out more about some individuals than others. With women, matters get more complicated – they might state that they were married, but you can’t locate a husband; they might go by one name, but was this their maiden name or married name, or even an alias?

They might claim to have been born in a particular place, in a particular year – but they may have had reason to fudge this to the authorities, perhaps not wanting to be traced, or for their families to face ignominy.

In some cases, most of what you know about them is from their criminal record – and it serves to remind us how that criminal record might actually be all that prevents them from becoming forgotten.

A small part of Lydia’s long record on the Digital Panopticon website (although the top entry appears to be for a different individual)

She is certainly present in the 1881 census, as an inmate of Woking Prison, and she is also present on the Old Bailey Online website. But outside of her criminal record, and that one census, I’ve struggled to locate her – or locate her with any confidence.

Lydia Lloyd claimed to have been born in 1843 in Wolverhampton. During her criminal career she described herself as a widow, a laundress, who had one child – in 1873, this daughter was said to be aged 15, so born around 1858.

No censuses prior to 1881 list a Lydia Lloyd born at around the right time in the Wolverhampton district. There seems to be no marriage of a Lydia to a Mr Lloyd; she would have been 15 when she had her daughter, so the marriage – if it had, in fact, taken place – presumably couldn’t have been much earlier than that, although it could, of course, have been later.

The births of seven Lydias were registered in the Wolverhampton district between the first quarter of 1842 and the last quarter of 1843. None, that I can find, married a man by the name of Lloyd. The 1861 census has no Lloyd family that could be Lydia’s.

In July 1873, Lydia Lloyd was charged with being drunk in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on the evening of 14 July, a local police constable stating that she had been so ‘very drunk’ that ‘quite a crowd’ had started following her round.

She was fined 5s and 6s costs, but failed to pay, and so was sent to prison for a week, according to the Banbury Advertiser of 17 July 1873. The Oxford Journal of two days later described her as being a widow, living in Calthorpe Street, in the centre of Banbury.

In October 1873, described as a laundress, she was charged with stealing a sack and skirt, worth 4s, from Oxford on 23 July and on the same day, also stealing underwear from a man on the Woodstock Road.

As with the previous offence, she was described as having been drunk at the time, and she had also struck a man across his back with the sack. When she had been questioned by police, she claimed to have ‘brought the sack and its contents from the Potteries in Staffordshire’.

The record of two charges against Lydia, from Ancestry

Lydia’s defence was described as ‘rambling’ – she said she had gone to a public house to get some drink, and afterwards went to sleep.

On waking up, ‘she was told to be off and take the sack with her’. She was convicted of one of the offences, and when sentence was passed, she was described as ‘an old offender’. She was given five years in prison, and a further five years under police surveillance (Oxford Journal, 11 October 1873).

Her most serious offence was heard in March 1879 at the Central Criminal Court. She was described as being aged 36, of no fixed abode, and a laundress. She was charged with stealing a shawl worth £1 from the Railway Hotel in Finchley, having been found hiding under a bed.

The press noted that she had several previous convictions, and was currently on a ticket-of-leave; she was convicted of theft and sentenced to ten years in prison (Hendon & Finchley Times, 8 March 1879).

Asked to explain the theft, all she could say, according to the papers, was “I came down from London and was drinking at the bar with a man, but how I came in the house, I don’t know.” She did not say where she had come to London from (Hendon & Finchley Times, 1 March 1879).

The Old Bailey Online records her as saying she had lost the train home from Finchley ‘and a young man gave her some whisky, stating that his father was the landlord of the hotel, and offered to pay for a bed for her; she drank several times, and remembered nothing till she found herself on the bed next morning’.

After her release from prison in 1886, Lydia disappears from the record. Searching for her both on ancestry websites and in the press leaves names but no corroborating evidence that it’s her.

Is Lydia the same Lydia Lloyd who ran a coffee house on Walsall’s High Street in 1893, and who prosecuted a 16-year-old for obtaining 6s by false pretences from her? Another newspaper disproves it, describing her as the wife of the coffee or cocoa house’s manager – not a widow, and not a previous convict who had made a new life for herself (Walsall Advertiser, 25 February 1893).

Perhaps she married again; perhaps she had never been married in the first place, but adopted a name and a marital status that made her daughter a respectable legitimate child. But we just don’t know.

What we do know is that this was a Midlands woman who had problems with drink; she stole, not just once, but frequently, as her numerous trials for theft attest. She was around 5 feet 2 inches; she was Catholic; she had grey eyes.

We can see her photograph; although she was convicted of thefts, the Digital Panopticon team record that she engaged in prostitution as well as thieving.

As a prisoner, she fought with others, was regarded as quarrelsome and insolent, struck an officer, refused to do what she was told, and spent time in solitary confinement. She slammed her cell door in a fit of temper; she laughed in chapel; she disliked the rules of prison life.

She moved around; she caught trains; she lived not only in Wolverhampton, but in Banbury – a provincial market town in north Oxfordshire – and in London.

Was she moving in search of work, or had she moved to live with a partner? Could she not make a living as a laundress, and had to seek money by stealing, or was it her drink that ended her legitimate work?

What seems clear is that if it wasn’t for her unsuccessful but fairly extensive criminal career, Lydia Lloyd would be forgotten about, like so many other Victorian women from the lower echelons of society. Thanks to the Digital Panopticon and other online sources of criminal records, however, a timeline of part of her life, at least, can be assembled and remembered.